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Erie, The Behrend College

Erie, The Behrend College

Biological clocks are found in any animal, from worms and flies up to humans, says Paul Bartell, assistant professor of avian biology. Working in concert with daylight and other environmental cues, these innate regulators control not just patterns of sleeping and eating, but hormone releases and many other cell processes as well. In songbirds, they dictate the delicate timing of migration.

While everything else changes, it's comforting to think that some things in the universe will always stay the same. The sun always rises and sets, the tides ebb and flow, and the moon hangs in the night sky, just as it has since time began.

During the 2004 election season, an animated streaming video featuring Senator John Kerry and President George Bush trading insults to the tune of This Land Is Your Land was seen by millions of people over the Internet—and was even viewed by astronauts on the International Space Station. The video was produced by a company called JibJab, which specializes in animated comedy set to patriotic songs, all poking fun at politicians.

Word came down in stages this summer. First, the rumor that our long-exclusive planetary club was ready to expand—not only renewing Pluto's status, but adding three new members in the bargain. The world's astronomers seemed to be sending a message of inclusion: There's always room for one more.

The other day I tried to toss my roommate some car keys. My right hand was clutching a stack of books so I threw with my left, sending the keys sailing directly into a ceiling tile. This left my roommate chuckling and me, in a shower of cheap foam particles, wondering: My left hand, though undoubtedly connected to my brain, constantly defies orders to be more like its brother. Is it possible to make this appendage more adroit?

Terraforming Mars—making the Red Planet Earth-like, so that humans could live there—is an idea that has been around since at least the early 1970s, when Carl Sagan and others first raised it seriously. In the 1990s, science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson based his 1,600-page Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) on the concept.

In the summer of 1976, my days centered on avoiding Bernadette. We were
both eleven and lived in the same working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, but that's where the resemblance ended. With closely cropped red hair and a compact muscular body, Bernadette rolled her shirtsleeves up like James Dean and wore a permanent sneer on her round freckled face. I was her opposite number, a romantic bookworm with brown braids who wandered around in a near-constant daydream.

"Ithink we should cut our brains some slack," says Dawn Blasko, grinning. "Our brains do an enormous amount of processing. In fact, they work like very effective computers, so effective that we only notice the few things that we forget. We never give our brains credit for the vast amount of material that we do, in fact, remember."

That said, it's still frustrating when we lose track of the car keys for the umpteenth time, or forget the name of a favorite restaurant. So, what accounts for these run-of-the-mill lapses?

When Sarah Smith came to Penn State as a freshman a few years ago, she got her first credit card. She soon had a bill to pay, so she took out another card to pay for the first using the cash advance feature. She kept opening more accounts to pay for other credit card bills until she was in debt $20,000—and forced to file for bankruptcy.

"Although the percentage of left-handed people among those over age 60 is lower than in the rest of the population, there is no indication that left-handedness leads to an early demise." —Nancy Marie Brown

Well now, that's a relief. Sort of. Not that I had been looking over my shoulder, exactly. In fact, I had been blissfully unaware of any danger. Since childhood, I had rarely thought of being left-handed as anything but a sign of superiority.

A female professor I know often laments, I wish I had a wife. You know, someone to have dinner waiting when she got home, to deal with dripping faucets and leaky roofs, to buy the groceries and sort the laundry and vacuum the house, to pick the kids up from school, feed them their snacks, and bundle them off to soccer practice or music lessons, to make sure they do their homework. It's a luxury not many young academics, female or male, can afford, the stay-at-home spouse. (My friend's husband is also a professor.)

At a public lecture last fall, Mary Chisholm passed out samples of androsterone, a hormone in the testosterone family. "It's a rather interesting compound," she explains. "To some people it smells like musty camphor. To others it is entirely revolting. A third group smells nothing at all." Her audience that night, Chisholm remembers, ran happily true to form: "A third of them smelled camphor; a third were entirely revolted; and a third smelled nothing at all.

All of March, Maria Womack woke up when the comet did—around three a.m. She leaned over in bed and pulled up the window shade. She looked to the east and then just a bit north, measuring with her hand about one or two fist widths up from the horizon. Sometimes the sky was too cloudy and she saw nothing at all. But sometimes she caught it, the fuzzy patch of light with its long foggy tail pointing straight up into the sky. Comet Hale-Bopp.